The Weekly Screed (#659)

George Jetson might
have been more convincing…
by David Benjamin

“The future of mobility will be done by electronics and — for sure — fun to drive!”                       
                    Rupert Stadler, Chairman, Audi Aktiengesellschaft

LAS VEGAS — Every year, one of the corporate Power Point extravaganzas at the epic National Gadget Expo — otherwise known as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — starts out slightly off-kilter then veers eerily toward the surreal. This year in Vegas, there were more than one of these Tilt-a-Whirl rides. Unfortunately, I missed the Samsung show in which moviemaker Michael Bay melted down and scurried offstage when his teleprompter blew a fuse.

However, I was present to enjoy the Audi Motors “keynote” session as it steered steadily toward the Twilight Zone. Among its oddities, I’m not counting the irony of the Computer Electronics Association’s CEO, Gary Shapiro, obsequiously introducing Audi obergruppenführer Rupert Stadler. Rich Jews cozying up to rich Germans will always convey a whiff of irony, but in the Global Economy, such prickly juxtapositions have become commonplace. And, to his credit, Shapiro didn’t seem quite as bubbly with Stadler as he is when he introduces Ford execs at CES. Moreover, Gary was careful not to address Stadler as “Herr General.”

But then, there was Hitler’s car.

It was the first of several gasp-inducing Audi vehicles to roll onstage at the Cosmopolitan Convention Center on a bleary Monday night in Sin City. OK, Rupert did not say that the glistening SS-black 1930’s-vintage Horch limo was actually the very car that zipped the Feuhrer around pre-Holocaust Berlin. But we learned that this model was the crème de la crème of Third Reich limousines. The question Shapiro tactfully did not ask: Would Chancellor Shicklgruber have settled for anything less than the crown jewel of Third Reich auto tech?

A moment later, the “Audi Show” host, an ironically non-Aryan sitcom actor (“The Big Bang Theory”) named Kunal Nayyar, started waving a small green motherboard (the next-generation Audi’s electronic control unit, or ECU) and bragging on Stadler’s behalf, that Audi technicians had “reduced a big engineering challenge to something a little bit smaller than an iPad.”

What big engineering challenge? The idea, explained Rupert, is to enable “the vehicle to take over for you” — “you” being the driver, and “take over” being the car driving itself, while “you” presumably crawl into the backseat with a bottle of Bollinger ‘68 and a romantic tryst with Pussy Galore.

Suddenly, the National Gadget Show is all about turning cars into doo-hickies — like PlayStations and Dick Tracy watches — that play themselves while human beings, fixed and fully dilated, go along for the ride.

In four days this year at CES, I heard not one auto executive or gushy high-tech enthusiast (Jaron Lanier calls them “cybernetic totalists”) mention a recent lawsuit lost by Toyota Motors in Oklahoma. There, a staunchly Republican jury decided that an ECU “a little bit smaller than an iPad” — responding to a random, unpredictable software glitch — had inadvertently killed a passenger and inflicted irreversible brain damage on the driver of a Toyota that accelerated beyond 80 miles an hour, de-activated the brakes and crashed the car spectacularly.

This sort of nightmare keeps happening, rarely, randomly, but regularly. No one really knows why. But automakers like Audi are — they say — fully committed in the name of “safety” to giving even more driving responsibility to software programs developed by geeks (“cybernetic totalists”) who believe in their hearts that “artificial intelligence” is way better than the real thing.

Ah, but then there was obergruppenführer Stadler stepping forth , showing off his shiny new red all-electric electronic Audi, touting it’s “emotional design” (I pictured rows of German engineers weeping at their drawing boards) and how it’s going to be really “fun to drive.”

I wondered: Can a car — even one that’s emotionally designed — have fun? And if the car’s having fun, is it fun for the people inside? Or will it be like a movie scene in which the owners of a hijacked car hug each other, terrified and screaming in the back seat, while the hijackers careen through a high-speed chase pursued by Steve McQueen and the entire San Francisco Police Department?

This wasn’t my only flash of cognitive dissonance at the Audi Show. For example, Rupert was thrilled over a new “user interface” in his cars, a “touchpad that responds to your handwriting” so that “you can interact with your car without taking your hands off the [steering] wheel.”

Yeah, I tried to work that one out in my head. Maybe it was just a case of Rupert driving, head-on, into the language barrier.

Inevitably, one of the themes of the Audi Show — more of a religious litany that’s invoked annually at CES — was the assurance from all the high-tech stars onstage that “people want to be connected,” and even more than that, they want to “close the gap between being connected in your automobile and being connected in your life.”

We do?

Do we want to hear phones ringing constantly in our ears, sicced on us by Google surveillance and Amazon demographics, interrupting the flow of self-shuffled muzak pumping through our earbuds while our thumbs dance on keypads and touchscreens, as our eyes dilate behind 3-D glasses, dazzled by an HUD (no, this doesn’t stand for Housing and Urban Development) windshield display showing readouts of every passenger’s pulse rate, blood pressure, electrolytes and body-fat percentage while also updating at ten-second intervals the car’s speed, RPMs, miles per gallon of gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, ethanol, hydrogen or plutonium, accompanied — using screen-in-screen technology — with relevant weather information including high-def fully animated Doppler radar, interspersed with the ultimate advancement in in-car infotainment, a full-length, windshield-wide, Technicolor, ultra-high-definition, three-dimensional screening of Transformers VI: The Autonomous Audi vs. Son of Godzilla, while the car (remember the car?), acting on its own discretion, breezily flips a gigabit, speeds up and glides almost magnetically toward a concrete bridge abutment (ah, there it is, looming ever larger in a diaphanous double-image over the terrified visage of Lindsay Lohan clutched in the claws of Godzilla’s offspring) at 93 miles per hour — no, 97 miles per hour — no, wait…

But this is a question inappropriate to the spirit of CES.

Oddly, the Audi Show’s climax came in the middle, followed by further mind-numbing car talk by obergruppenführer Stadler and his science guy, the Werner von Braun of 21st-century German automotive technology, Professor Ulrich Hackenberg. Said climax consisted of laser beams flashing throughout the auditorium, while gaily lit dancers cavorted. After all the talk about a brave new future where androids dream of electrical sheep and cars carry on capriciously like Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000, the technology deployed was reassuringly retro.

Busting their moves to a 30-year-old classic hip-hop beat, the dancers wore fluorescent strips that glowed vividly under an array of black lights — a 1960’s technology that evoked the art of Peter Max, and summoned fuzzy home-movie memories of Tommy James and the Shondells playing “Crystal Blue Persuasion” in the midst of a psychedelic light show at the Fillmore West. Groovy, man!

After the Audi Show petered out, it seemed to me that if Germany really wants to sell the autobahn-loving public on the idea of a self-driving luxury muscle-car, Rupert needs a new director.

Michael Bay might be available, but really…

… Where the heck is Leni Riefenstahl when you need her?